Ask any politician or influential business person about their vision for the economy and chances are they will tout the value of entrepreneurship and innovation. It’s a bland and safe answer that will resonate with a lot of people. It’s also true to some extent. Creative thinking coupled with the ability to act and implement can lead to successful businesses. Problem is, very few understand where this innovative power comes from and far too many believe STEM subject teaching is the only important factor.

A popular theme in science fiction is the idea of the future merger of humans and machines. It’s often portrayed as a singular event. In reality it’s more gradual and we are closer to it than we can probably imagine.

I tend to write a lot about customer service and how (poorly) companies handle customer dissatisfaction because it’s such a source of success and failure. Customer experience is something I try to excel at as a business owner. Unfortunately, not every business shares my priorities, as this case shows.

For a very long time, the quintessential sign that someone had more than a cursory interest in you at a bar was their act of sharing their phone number. Books have been written on how to get a date and the “number” is a linchpin step in most of them. However modern technology may soon make that obsolete as the use of identifiers is replaced by referencing someone as who they are.

Something that caused quite a bit of a stir a while ago was the revelation that Sweden had dropped considerably in OECD’s international PISA school rankings. Politicians were eager to get media attention, pointing fingers at the opposition for this and that, turning it into yet another left versus right blame game. A common theme was a call for more order and a more strict school. I think the explanation is not whether teachers need to seen as authoritarian figures but rather as to whether they help students believe in themselves.

A lot of my work revolves around finding ways to apply technology in a way that helps people be productive and effective in their lives. It’s a fun challenge that gives you the opportunity to learn new things. However, underneath it lies an ages old struggle between two traditions: human vs machine.

One of the things that can relatively easy make your company stand head and shoulders above the competition is great positive customer service. I was reminded of this the past weekend. Cued by the terms in a car rental contract, I immediately thought of the same mechanism could be achieved with less agony for the customer.

A lot of people know me as the “estimates guy” thanks to my conference sessions on estimating Drupal and web projects. But in the years since I’ve had reason to revise my opinion on the use of estimates. These are my realizations and insights since.

The challenges of hiring developers and technical team members keep vexing more and more people. It’s a natural development as technology becomes a more and more integral part of our lives and businesses are more dependent than ever on skilled technical staff. But if you’re not a programmer yourself, hiring one can be a daunting task, whether you’re looking for a technical co-founder or a new developer for your product team.

It’s the snow season. Or for us who enjoy zipping down mountainsides with pieces of glass and carbon fiber strapped to our feet, it’s the ski or snowboard season. Here are 7 tips to make your ski and snowboard days even better.

In its latest version, Google Docs spreadsheets now support using formulas for conditionally formatting cell font and background colors. What this means is that you can make your sheets much easier to read. Here are some useful formulas for sprucing up your sheets.

I was excited today to see that Apple had released the new version of Keynote. An avid user and long time fan, I was looking forward to seeing the new features. So far I’m mostly disappointed, and it’s because of one tiny detail.

Welcome to the world of conference creation --- a challenge of organizing, coordinating and planning. A lot of work leading up to just a few days of intense emotions. I'm glad you've decided to take on this challenge and I hope the conference creation experience will be as rewarding for you as mine have been. This guide was written with the intent of helping you make your conference a blast and a source of fun and excitement for organizers as well as attendees.

Anyone who’s worked with text has been in the situation where something needs to be changed but the changes are too complex for the standard search and replace function to do any good, resulting in hours of manual work. For these situations, learning regular expressions is a worthwhile investment. Though regular expressions may look scary, just understanding the basics will save you hours of time.

You can’t believe it. Your friend. Confidante. Colleague. Yes, your laptop, is gone. Your chances of seeing it again hinge on the kindness of strangers. But they won’t be able to help unless they know that you are the rightful owner. In cases like these, it’s useful to have set a lock screen message on your Mac.

So it turns out you have a Saturday available and it’s unplanned and you wonder what to do with it. It’s a perfect opportunity to pick up new knowledge and skills. In this series of posts, I’ll introduce technologies and tools that save time and that you can learn in a day. Some of these tools are useful for web developers and some will be of benefit to people who just use computers a lot.

There are some tools that are so powerful that you can do really stupid things with them. Used the wrong way, they allow you to create behemoths of unmaintainable code and co-dependencies. JQuery is one of those tools. On the other hand, used wisely, you can also do infinitely useful things with it. Five minutes will show you how.

I’m doing more and more writing in Scrivener, including blog posts, and I use Markdown for formatting. Working on a longer post, I had to find a way to integrate tables nicely and still get Markdown output. Luckily, I’ve found a workflow that works.

This is a paper I wrote back when I was studying cognitive science as part of a course in artificial intelligence. Unlike my classmates who wrote on algorithms and research in "fuzzy logic", I wrote about the philosophical implications of AI. It's almost ten years old but I believe many of the ideas presented regarding cyborgs and the definition of intelligence still hold water and are as relevant as ever.

I recently experienced a customer service situation which left me very dissatisfied. But the situation was in fact a missed opportunity for the seller to make me very happy. Missed because of policy. Don't make that mistake. Make sure you spot and act on opportunities to build truly remarkable relationships with your customers.

I recently went skiing. For this trip I modified my helmet headphones with the simple addition of a mike with remote control button. Here's some DIY for you who want to stay connected while on the slopes!

How many of the services you use do you allow to "connect" to your Facebook or Twitter account? If you're like me, not many. Too many times a web service has given itself extraordinary freedom to act on my behalf and 'sharing' my activity on Facebook. I've felt betrayed. But I believe this can be avoided if we just formalize expected etiquette through 'social contracts'.

I love science fiction. I sometimes wish I was born in the future because I believe the most interesting times are yet to come. Still, within our life time we will see remarkable changes. Here are some of my predictions of technology that will make it into the mainstream in the coming decades, and with it bring massive change.